The eugenic legacy of a 1927 Supreme Court decision to sterilize “imbeciles.”

The New Republic reports:

American progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and Margaret Sanger were inspired by social Darwinism and became gripped by a fervor for eugenics, a pseudoscience that considered human poverty, criminality, disability, and sexual promiscuity to be heritable traits, as immutable as pea color. If the “unfit and undesirable” could be prevented from breeding, eugenists believed, the human race could be remade within several generations, mentally and morally pure.

The progressives notice their past, finally.